I can’t help but root for tiny open source AI model maker Arcee

Arceea tiny US startup of 26 people that built a massive 400B open source LLM on a limited budget of $20M has released its new reasoning model. Arcee calls the Trinity Large Thinking model — and it’s the most capable open-weight model “ever released by a non-Chinese company,” CEO Mark McQuade claims to TechCrunch.

As this comment implies, Arcee has a goal that I can’t help but root for: She wants to give American and Western companies a model that gives them no reason to use a China-based model.

While the Chinese models are extremely capable, they are perceived as dangerousputting power, and perhaps data, in the hands of a government that does not share all the ideals of the Western world.

With Arcee, companies can download the model, train it to their own needs, and use it on site. Companies can also use the cloud-hosted version of Arcee, accessible via API.

While Arcee’s models don’t outperform closed-source models from big labs like Anthropic or OpenAI, they’re not held hostage by the whims of those giants.

For example, Claude, with his excellent coding skills, was a popular choice for users of the OpenClaw open source artificial intelligence tool. But Anthropic pulled the rug out from under them last week when it told users that their Anthropic subscriptions would no longer cover their use of OpenClaw – they would have to pay extra for it. (In February, OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger said he would join Anthropic’s biggest rival, OpenAI.)

Instead, McQuade points out with pride data from OpenRouter which he says has become one of the top models used with OpenClaw.

So, how good is Trinity Large Thinking? It’s comparable to some of the other top open source models, according to benchmark results shared with TechCrunch.

As we mentioned earlier, it’s no head-on threat to the big cheese among open-top US-made models: Meta’s Llama 4. But it doesn’t have the weirdness either, not really open source license issues of Meta’s model. All of Arcee’s Trinity models ship with the gold standard for operating system licenses, Apache 2.0.

To be clear, there are also countless other US startups offering open source models, and as a fan of startup ingenuity, I’m rooting for them too.